He sits really low doesn’t he…

Yes. I like drummers who have a low centre of gravity because there’s a lot of drummers out there that have this sort of high end and top stuff but few have that bottom. It’s hard to be a hard, tough, rocky player and be loose at the same time - there’s a kind of art to that.

Have you a favourite track on the current album? I’m pleased you played Cry when the crowd shouted you back; my favourite track.

We nearly fucked it up. It’s the first time we played it. We didn’t even rehearse it, and we rehearsed half of it when we went out with Clapton and that was it. We only just tried it tonight… I thought ‘Shit, how does this go?’ But I would have to say that Cry is my favourite track. I love Cry and I love Smokestack. It’s difficult to choose because I love the record as a whole. I’ve never done that before.

The production sounds very loose…

Pretty much. And that’s hard to find too because I think that’s a job for producers … is to really let them be free in there, particularly if the artists know what they are doing. Let them do what they do and just try and capture what they can do at their fullest without trying to change them. And I think that’s where Jim Scott and Ben Mont really helped with arrangements and all the pre-production we did. But then when we went into the studio, Jim Scott just sort of just went: ‘Hey, I’m gonna get the best sounds for you, and you guys just have fun’. You know I’ve never heard that! There are things that are unplanned on the record like the instrumentals at the end of Cry and Smokestack, and that was the other great thing about having these producers. Also we had some good players - some great players - on the record like Bill who is Tom Petty’s keyboard player, and also Craig Ross, the guitar player from Lenny Kravitz’s band. Like the end of Thin Dream is a cool thing, and you can hear everybody from the drummer, the bass player and the piano, to Craig and me; and we go back and forth, and everybody gets chance to have their say. It makes for a very interesting moment because that doesn’t happen on record too often.

Did you aim for a diversity of pace in the album?

We didn’t ever really plan for it; I just knew that in order for music to be heard these days you’ve got to have ’single’ type songs and luckily we didn’t have to do that because we came up with a couple of songs like Soul Shaker, Green Light Girl and Send Some Love which were only about three and a half minutes. So since the record company thought that they had the songs they could put on the radio, that sort of freed us to have songs that were eight minutes long and not worry about it. And all of it was done without a lot of thought to it or a lot of talking from the record company - it just sort of happened. That’s the good thing because that means that we got to record a record that we wanted to record without any interference.

** Any way you slice it, Smokestack is not only one of the years great album, it in fact ended up becoming Shakenstir’s Album Of The Year, & in 2009 it still ounds amazing & we can’t wait to catch Doyle with Arc Angels This Spring…